Pages

Friday, February 22, 2008

Ayatollah Mohammad Emami-Kashani is pictured at Tehran University. The top Iranian cleric has told the UN Security Council to stay out of the crisis over Tehran’s contested nuclear drive, ahead of a key report by the UN atomic watchdog.

The long awaited IAEA report on Iran nuclear program has just been released and it details Iran’s continuing uranium enrichment and development of centrifuges.

Iran has shown new openness about nuclear advances earlier off-limits to U.N. monitors but not enough to prove the program is not geared to making bombs, the International Atomic Energy Agency said on Friday.

While an IAEA report painted a more positive picture of Iranian cooperation than before, it also confirmed Iran was testing technology that could give it the means to enrich uranium much faster — in further defiance of demands to halt all sensitive nuclear activity or be hit with wider U.N. sanctions.

The IAEA findings, which also said Iran had failed to clear up all outstanding questions by an agreed February deadline, may be branded negative on balance by big powers and spur the U.N. Security Council to adopt more sanctions as early as next week.

So, in other words, Iran has NOT been forthcoming and has not cleared up any ambiguity whether they are developing a nuclear weapon. Look for an American and EU call for more UN sanctions which WILL be either watered down or blocked outright by Russia and China.

Key graph:

“The (weaponization) studies is a matter of serious concern and critical to an assessment of a possible military dimension to Iran’s nuclear program,” said the confidential report, obtained by Reuters.

“The agency will not be in a position to make progress towards providing credible assurances about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran before reaching some clarity on the nature of the alleged (weaponization) studies, and without implementation of the Additional Protocol (wide-ranging, snap inspections).”

Without that, it said, there could be “no confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of the program.”

If Iran has clean hands they would immediately open up their nuclear program to inspections.